Are clouds an acceptable alternative to your own hard drives? - Any links to good hardware forums or pointers to external HDD enclosures with controllers that never go stand by?

[Ralf Mardorf]

Hi Bret,

I would like to begin my answer with a side note. I use ext4 and hfs+,
but it would of course be no problem to format Samsung
or other external USB SSDs.

When it comes to data preservation, HDDs offer not only theoretical,
technical "knowledge" but also decades of practical experience.

An external drive for archiving data may not be used for years.
Theoretically, HDDs lose data and the lubricants become so solid that
the disks can no longer rotate. In practice, the data is almost always
perfectly preserved and the disks run like they've just been lubricated.

There are conflicting statements regarding SSDs when it comes to data
retention if they have not been used for even six months, and there is
also no decades-long practical experience confirming long-term
durability.

I only use CMR (PMR) hard drives for backups and data archiving. I don't
even touch SMR, CMR EAMR, MAMR, or possible other available HDDs. Maybe
those new microwave HDDs are better than those CMR I'm using, but it's
the same as with SSDs. Nobody nor I has got any decades long practical
experiences.

Of course, a batch of CMR HDDs from 15 years ago cannot be compared to
last year's batch, you never know exactly how secure the data is. Of all
the options available to me, however, I consider CMR HDDs to be the most
secure medium. There are media that are probably more secure, but they
are not an option for me. And as I said, no one knows whether SSDs are
more secure or perhaps totally unreliable, it's all just speculation.

Another point is that both HDDs and SSDs have a controller with firmware
that enables the connection via USB. The same disastrous problem,
whereby the controller forces a standby/sleep mode and can have side
effects such as a wake-up failure that prevents data from being written,
is not resolved by using SSDs instead of HHDs.

I am very critical of ready-made solutions anyway. I prefer to install a
drive in a case myself, and the reasons for this are also based on
practical experience.

FWIW all my internal drives are NVMe SSDs and SATA SSDs. The external
CMR HDDs are only connected to backup and to archive data and after the
process is finished, they are disconnected, hence even a reliable
working stand by/sleep mode doesn't make sense at all, it only would
enforce spin downs and spin ups that are completely unnecessary and that
harm the drives.

This would not be a problem with SSDs, but not all standby and wake-up
modes work as expected. With most controller firmwares, this results in
input/output errors, and I am not alone in this experience. Of course,
there are workarounds. For example, gvfs can help in some cases, which I
would never install, but I could use a script to prevent a controller
from going into standby mode. However, I don't want workarounds for
something that shouldn't be solved with a workaround.

Regards,
Ralf